We show that the subsemigroup of the product of w_1-many circles generated by
the L-space constructed by J. Moore is again an L-space. This leads to a new
example of a Lindelof topological group. The question whether all finite powers
of this group are Lindelof remains open.
We study the topological structure of the direct limit $\glim G_n$ of a tower
of topological groups $(G_n)$ in the category of topological groups and show
that under some conditions on the tower $(G_n)$ the topology of $\glim G_n$
coincides with the topology of the direct limit $\ulim G_n$ of the groups $G_n$
endowed with the Roelcke uniformity in the category of uniform spaces.
We present a topological characterizations of LF-spaces and some other spaces
of the form $\Omega\times\IR^\infty$. Those characterizations are applied to
recognizing the topology of small box-product and uniform direct limits of
Polish ANR-groups.
We detect Hilbert manifolds among homogeneous metric spaces and apply the
obtained results to recognizing Hilbert manifolds among homogeneous spaces of
the form G/H where G is a metrizable topological group and H is a closed
balanced subgroup of G.